Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield went on Fox News this week to discuss whether or not California is overreacting with their stay-at-home order
"0.03 [percent] chance of dying from COVID in the state of California," Erickson said on "The Ingraham Angle". "Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?"
"When someone dies in this country right now, they're not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They're saying 'Did they die from COVID?'" Erickson says in another video. "We've been to hundreds of autopsies. You don't talk about one thing, you talk about comorbidities. ER doctors now [say] 'It's interesting when I'm writing about my death report, I'm being pressured to add COVID. Why is that?
"Something else is going on here. This is not about science and it's not even about COVID. When [authorities] use the word 'safe' -- if you listen to the word 'safe', that's about controlling you."
Erickson defended his comments on Ingraham and said he has looked to Sweden for inspiration. In Sweden, their restriction have less restricting and have had positive results.
"They've some basic social distancing and [a] doctor just finished doing a report where he said there's really not a lot of science backing these techniques," he said. "And if you look at their numbers: 200 deaths per million compared to ours, [which is] about the same. Italy's [is] about 400 per million and Spain is about 400 per million, so we are looking at this going, 'OK, they took a completely different approach and their results are basically the same.'"
He continued by saying that Sweden's strategy is focused on "herd immunity." This is where people in a community are put in contact with each other so they can produce antibodies that would fight off a recurrence of the infection.
"Once [the herd immunity rate] hits 70 or 80 percent, the virus has nowhere else to go and it burns out," Erickson said, later adding, " ... So I think the key is the vaccine helps get you to herd immunity, but also, you can get to herd immunity without a vaccine."
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